Where to start?

Understand

Uncover the ABCs of Empathy Platform: grasp the core principles, learn the essential concepts, master basic elements, and unlock advanced search features to optimize your product search and discovery experience within your commerce store.

Onboard

Get started on your journey with a comprehensive step-by-step guide to have Empathy Platform up and running in your commerce store effortlessly.

Play

Dive deep into the Empathy Platform Playboard and learn how to use search and discovery analytics & insights, fine-tuning tools, and search explainability features.

Develop

Plunge towards technical product documentation. Explore UI and API references and guides to learn the inner workings of Empathy Platform and assemble your search and discovery experience.

Video Library

Map

Blog

What's new

Relevant topics

AI Mode Integrate into VTEX AI Carousels Search approaches AI infrastructure Interface X Components injection Related Prompts Self-managed Components Insights Semantics dataviz Semantics API Hybrid search Search relevance Search data privacy Semantics recommendations Prepare your catalog Product catalog fields Tagging integration UI reference API references

Last doc updates

Fri 24 Jul, 2026

Instance Management Console

Revamped the Configure X-Controls settings page to describe the new settings available for the search layer UI.

Tue 21 Jul, 2026

Conversational search

Published Discover AI Mode to walk through the new conversational search interface ans its key actions.

Conversational search

Published Conversational search landing page to introduce the new search type available in Empathy Platform.

Next Queries

Updated the Next Queries overview page to edit information on when and where next queries appear.

Tue 30 Jun, 2026

AI Carousel API

Updated new AI Carousel API documentation to remove references to low-result scenarios.

AI Carousels

Updated the AI Carousels overview page and other related pages to remove references to low-result scenarios since this feature now surfaces only for no-result searches.

What's new in Empathy Platform

Jun 26, 2026

X-Controls: configure your entire search UI from one place

The Instance Management Console (IMC) is where you configure and manage your Empathy Platform instance. Starting today, the new X-Controls section extends the IMC to your entire search UI: configure your search UI's behavior, layout, and branding, plus the query preview carousels that recommend products to shoppers, all from a single configuration form.

From the Playboard's IMC you can set general settings to control the core behavior of your search layer. For example, decide whether to activate...

Read more

July 21, 2026

Conversational search: a new way to search, built for how shoppers think

Empathy Platform's search offering has grown from keyword search to hybrid and semantic search, and from there to AI-assisted features like Related Prompts and AI Carousels. Each step has made search more tolerant of imprecise queries, more resilient at the edges of the catalog, and more aligned with genuine shopper intent. What they've had in common, though, is that shoppers still had to work within the logic of a keyword-composed query. Today, that changes.

Empathy Platform introduces AI Mode, a fully conversational search experience...

Read more

June 26, 2026

AI Next Queries complete your follow-up search experience

Until now, Next Queries suggestions relied on organic behavioral data or manual curation, leaving gaps for queries with limited shopper history or thin merchandiser coverage. Empathy Platform introduces AI Next Queries, a new synthetic generation mechanism that completes the Next Queries experience by suggesting relevant follow-up searches even where organic and curated data falls short...

Read more